Talk:Edouard Daladier
I'll do Wolff and Leopold later. And whoever took over after Wolff got wounded--I forget who that was. Anyway, now that we've got templates and sections and a zillion categories, and cross-references to little-used articles whose exact titles I keep forgetting, filling in these red links is a lot of work. Turtle Fan 16:27, 23 August 2009 (UTC) :I started to do Leopold, and then my computer did something stupid. I'll finish up. I'll even throw in Antonescu as a bonus (incidentally, he may be the center of an inconsistency). TR 19:21, 23 August 2009 (UTC) ::Oh? I actually didn't notice anything in HW myself. Turtle Fan 20:16, 23 August 2009 (UTC) :::He was referred to Marshal Antonescu. He wasn't a marshal in OTL until 1940. Moreover, he wasn't even in power until 1940. But the embassy fellow warns Peggy that she may have worry about Atonescu and his goons. :::Granted, since HT is just moving various events up by one year, I guess Antonescu could just have come to power sooner. Certainly, the conditions that brought him to power are present in HW. TR 00:39, 24 August 2009 (UTC) ::::I see. ::::Smigly-Rydz was never head of state nor head of government in Poland: not in the winter of 1938, not ever. He was Marshall of Poland and commander-in-chief of the Army (though that wasn't his exact title, but the job description was the same). Maybe there was a military coup once Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia? Turtle Fan 02:02, 24 August 2009 (UTC) :::::Given that the military had major influence in Warsaw politics following the Coup of May 1926, and that S-R was officially called the "second man in the state after the president," on first glance I cannot find major fault with this position in the book. Jelay14 03:33, 24 August 2009 (UTC) ::::::This. Also knowing a little of how propaganda worked under Stalin, laying the blame at Smigly-Rydz feet would be more ideologically sound. TR 23:38, 24 August 2009 (UTC) :::::::How so? :::::::Even if blaming him is good propaganda, making him carry exclusive blame doesn't make much sense. Doesn't being Number Two imply the existence of a Number One? Someone other than him was involved in the implementation of the offending policies, real or imagined. Turtle Fan 01:56, 25 August 2009 (UTC) ::::::::Well there was the president -- a cypher who only got the job because he never said no to Jozef Pilsudski, and ended up sharing power with Smigly-Rydz -- or the prime minister, whose only claim to fame was a decree forcing every household to have a working latrine. Jelay14 22:52, 25 August 2009 (UTC) :::::::::That strikes me as sound policy. Turtle Fan 01:06, 26 August 2009 (UTC) Daladier after Coup d'Etat Anyone care to make a wild-ass guess as to who will succeed Daladier in TWPE? I'm not particularly in the know when it comes to French PMs, but given HT patterns, and how things are going, I'm going to guess Pierre Laval (for his facist tendencies) will hold the office for a time, but will ultimately lose out as the country turns left again, giving us, oh, let's say, Paul Reynaud, and then the Third Republic collapses and the new Fourth Republic arises under the leadership of de Gaulle. TR 18:16, February 14, 2012 (UTC) :I'm even less knowledgeable about likely French candidates than you, but I was also thinking Laval. The Nazis would like that, and that seems to be what counts. :Of course, we may well never know. France is getting very short shrift in this story. They didn't even get a visit from a Hess analog to talk them into double-crossing the Soviets; we were just left to assume that whatever deal the British cut applied to the French as well. Turtle Fan 20:05, February 14, 2012 (UTC) ::So, donutting--it occurred to me the other day that we "might" just have a POV in France in CdE: Wolfgang Storch, that friend of Willi Dernen's who surrendered to the French rather than get caught by the SS. This would be an interesting character for HT to follow--poor Storch thought he was solving his problems be turning himself into the French, then the French joined the Germans. Presumably, all former POWs are going to be sent home, but Storch would want nothing to do with this. ::Thus, Storch would probably be doing everything in his power to stay in France, but the French would have very little incentive to let him stay--indeed doing so would be an embarassment. This could put him in the position to rub shoulders with various anti-big switch elements; he certainly benefits more if France and Germany are not allies. ::Obviously I'm just kicking ideas around. Storch could literally show up long enough to get shot in the face by Baatz or someone at the end of book 6. But I think he has the potential to make an interesting story arc, and I hope HT did, too. TR 21:57, March 19, 2012 (UTC) :::Hmm, has potential. I had forgotten about him. His only real hope is to slip through the cracks and be overlooked by the French. :::Thing is, he's small fry. The Maquis might be happy to welcome a defective officer to the ranks, but to help out a private who'd been out of the loop for a couple years would involve considerable risk with minimal payout, be it in the realm of intelligence or PR or whatever. ::::I guess my counter point here would be that he could be a poster child for just how terrible the Nazis are ("Hey, this guy was so terrified of his own government that he surrendered himself!"), and how bad it could be for France to align with Germany. So, some value as to PR. I agree he'd be more or less worthless for intelligence purposes. He could share with everyone that the Germans weren't that prepared and really just lucked into their initial victories; that would be more PR value now, too.TR 22:33, March 20, 2012 (UTC) :::::There might be a little PR value, but the Germans can probably find people who dislike Storch to rebut it with "Oh, him? He was always a coward, or he had an axe to grind, or else he was just a crank." People expect there to be a few bad apples in every bunch--those assholes who shot up the Afghan village earlier this month obviously weren't typical of US servicemen. An officer isn't so easy to dismiss, because if you use too much character assassination you beg the question of why you put him in a position of authority if he's so bad. A hundred or so privates are impossible to ignore, but one grunt can be dismissed. Turtle Fan 04:33, March 21, 2012 (UTC) :::Now given how the Gestapo and Baatz haunted poor old Willi over the Storch affair, if he were to reappear in the Reich it could throw a spanner into the works for Dernen. At least he wouldn't be forgotten altogether. Turtle Fan 04:50, March 20, 2012 (UTC) ::::That is another likely alternative. Obviously, HT has left the fate of more than one character unsolved. Storch could join their ranks. TR 22:33, March 20, 2012 (UTC) :::::I think the fact that he's had a lingering effect on the POV who knew him, even if that effect was minor, improves his chances of getting closure. No guarantees, of course. Turtle Fan 04:33, March 21, 2012 (UTC) Now Daladier REALLY after CdE Well, once again the above seems completely naive. In any case, I still don't rule out some more dramatic civil conflict in France. Demange and Harcourt frequently spoke of French soldiers who were really hip to the war with USSR. And as TF pointed out elsewhere, there were many in the French General Staff who were crypto-fascist and helped run Vichy France. There might be coup attempts and counter coups and shooting the streets of Paris, etc. TR (talk) 15:07, August 11, 2012 (UTC) :One can hope. Turtle Fan (talk) 16:47, August 14, 2012 (UTC) I haven't read the last book but the bit about French troops surrendering and being immediately shipped to France seems very nice for our uncle Joe. I could have expected him to ship the French to Siberia for "security reasons" and then say "Well, the nearest port is Vladivostok, and you are at war with Japan, aren't you...?"Eljuma (talk) 16:25, August 14, 2012 (UTC) :It wasn't a surrender, it was a mass defection. Once the flares went off, France was a Soviet ally again. Turtle Fan (talk) 16:47, August 14, 2012 (UTC) ::Or at the minimum no longer fighting the USSR. I edited to make that clearer. I was going to use the word defection, but that implies that the French troops were joining the Soviet side against France, which wasn't the case. "Surrender" is semantically imperfect, but I'm not sure of a better word. TR (talk) 17:12, August 14, 2012 (UTC) :::True, "Defection" doesn't really work either. I do think it's closer than surrender, if only because the French hung on to their weapons. What if we called it "part of a realignment of their government's foreign policy"? Turtle Fan (talk) 18:53, August 14, 2012 (UTC)